Mass shootings: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans"

Update, April 2023: I wrote this in 2018 after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz massacred 17 students and faculty at Parkland High School, Florida. With the recent murders of three children and three faculty at Nashville's The Covenant School on March 17 by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, I am reposting it. Nothing has changed, of course, because politicians on both the Left and the Right are far more interested in scoring points against the other side than protecting the lives of children. 

If things proceed according to pattern, there will be energetic debate after the latest school massacre about stopping such a horror from happening again, then the news media will move on to other topics. And the American people, who have generally been trained over the last 50-plus years not to think something is important unless it's on TV, will move on also.

And in a few months or next year, when it happens again, lather, rinse, repeat.

This inability to take meaningful action is due to several factors, one of which is the existing (and strengthening) political divide in the country. But the main reasons, I think, are pretty simple:

• both sides firmly believe that the other side is solely responsible for the deadlock, 
• both sides' most prominent voices insist that there is a "silver bullet" solution that by itself will completely resolve the issue, and
• neither side will admit that its own broader political core beliefs are already part of the cause for these shootings. Both demand that all of the surrendering must be done by the other side.

So I proceed on the basis of this post's title: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." I learned this very well when I was assigned to the Army Operations Center in the early 1990s at the Pentagon. The Army's chief of staff was Gen. Carl Vuono. He sometimes found occasion during our briefings to him about current and planned operations to hammer home a point: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." 

Don't tell me what you hope will happen, don't tell me what you wish you could do, he repeated. "Give me a plan that makes it happen."

Stop offering "Bell the cat" solutions

One of Aesop's fables 

... concerns a group of mice who debate plans to nullify the threat of a marauding cat. One of them proposes placing a bell around its neck, so that they are warned of its approach. The plan is applauded by the others, until one mouse asks who will volunteer to place the bell on the cat. All of them make excuses. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan not only on how desirable the outcome would be, but also on how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan.

Anyone who thinks that there is one thing that, if done, will stop mass shootings (whether at schools or elsewhere) is actually not thinking at all. They are making political statements, not relevant statements, and are so convinced of the moral purity of their own side that they think that a wish is a plan and that their wish, if fulfilled, will automatically result in zeroing out mass shootings. 

Here are two examples, one from each side. On the Left: 

• "We must ban AR-15s and similar weapons."

In fact, we cannot ban these weapons. I am not saying we should not ban them, or must not ban them. I am saying we cannot ban them. It is impossible. The same with "high-capacity" magazines. 

Yes, we could legislate that they may not be manufactured or imported into the country. So? There are still tens of millions already here (no one knows how many). Will you ban them also? If so, as The Beatles sang long ago, "We'd all love to see the plan." Besides, when testifying before Congress, the director of the ATF, Steve Dettelbach, told the House Appropriations Committee that he was not able to define what an "assault rifle" is. 

Don't even utter the word, "Australia." Their 1996 ban was mandatory, requiring residents to hand over their firearms to the government, but the government paid for them, which would be mandatory here (that pesky Constitution's "takings clause"). Where will the the US government get $30 billion (at minimum) to do that? Do not even dare to suggest cutting only spending beloved by the Right, such as defense. If you are not willing to pare Left-loved spending, then you are not serious about stopping school shootings at all. You're just trying to score political points. 

Are you willing to zero out payouts and tax-money support, for example, of Planned Parenthood, the NEA, NPR, etc. to diminish the number of AR weapons in America? No? Then you will understand why I am completely ignoring you. 

That said, in Australia's ban only 20 percent of Australian gun owners complied. One out of five. The ban, btw, had little effect on crime rates or suicides there, but it did create a thriving black market in firearms, including black-market importation. See here and here, for example. 

Ban AR-type weapons? Well, show me your plan. If in your plan no one's ox gets gored but your political opponents', you have not got a plan to save kids' lives, you have a platform for fund raising and campaigning. 

And finally: "'Assault Weapon' Bans Look More Legally Vulnerable Than Ever." 

On the Right:

• "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." 

If I hear that one more time I will not know whether to throw up or just laugh out loud. Okay, good guys with guns do stop bad guys with guns countless times per year (that's why we arm police, after all),  and good guys (cops) with guns definitely stopped Audrey Hale before she could murder anyone else.

And yes, schools by law are "gun free zones," and yes, "gun free zone" really is a euphemism for "defenseless people here."

Fine. But then your advocates post stupid stuff like this:

This meme has been around since at least 2012 and is simply false. False as in "untrue," as Israelis on social media have attempted to refute. Here is Israel Today:

There is a picture going around the Internet that I have seen about a dozen times today that claims that Israeli teachers are packing heat. Well, are they? The answer is “NO.” There may be some exceptions in dangerous areas like the West Bank (where five percent of Israelis live), but in general, Israeli teachers are not walking around like it’s the Wild Wild West, strapped with a six shooter. No, our teachers are not focused on shooting, but educating. That doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t protect young students.

In the picture, the students are on an outing. While it appears that the teacher is holding a rifle, I have never seen such a thing in ten years of living here. Rest assured however, they are under armed protection. In most cases it is an armed guard or a soldier that will accompany a class, not the teacher. And my guess is that the woman with the gun is a security guard, not a teacher.

Secondly, they are not armed in the classroom. Is that really the image you want to imprint on the minds of six-year-olds? (That would be Hamas.)

Even so, suppose that it was made legal for faculty and staff to volunteer to go armed in schools. What's your plan to implement? Just let them get a carry license and go for it? Will they be required also to take shoot-or-no-shoot training, repeated at intervals? Will they be paid extra for carrying? Will they wear distinctive identifying clothing so they don't shoot each other by mistake? Will their local governments accept the financial liability for using their weapons when the shooter, if he lives, or his family, if he doesn't, sue the teacher who shoots him and the rest of the district? (and they will sue.) All of these factors also apply to other categories of potential guards, such as veterans or retired police.

In the wake of the Aurora, Colo., mass murder in a movie theater, I wrote elsewhere about the ignore-reality advocates of the "good guy with a gun" argument as applying to crowded venues of panicked people, which is what Parkland's high school became when the shooting started.

But let's assume you do unmistakably locate the shooter and decide to engage him. You have a 9mm compact-sized, semi-auto pistol with the typical 7-10 round magazine (though the Beretta PX4 compact holds up to 15). The killer is firing madly, apparently about 25 feet away. You shoot at him.

You will miss. Your heart rate is through the roof. So is your respiration rate. You are sweating like a marathon runner. Your hands are shaking. These are involuntary physiological responses and you can do pretty much nothing about them. They badly affect shooting accuracy. Also, you are being jostled by panicked people trying to get away. And firearms trainers know that even on a range, firing under stress makes people fire high unless they are collected enough to correct for it intentionally. However, being a typical permit holder, the only actual pistol training you ever got was when you went to the class to certify the permit application. When you shoot again, you will miss then, too. And the next time.

But now you have identified yourself as a threat to the killer, assuming his state of mind lets him notice your fire (which he might not, to be fair). So he turns his semi-auto AR-15 on you and starts pulling the trigger. Now you are dead or badly wounded. The shooter is unharmed and still shooting.

In 2011, not even the very pro-gun site, The Truth About Guns could endorse the idea that more people going armed would do anything to stop public-venue mass shootings. Even so, as I have said, show me your comprehensive plan and I will listen. Not until then. See here, too. (However, it is probably appropriate here for me to explain why I am an armed pastor.) 

Stop proposing to bell the cat, all of you. There are zero steps to end school shootings or make them much more difficult that are not going to press hard on what all of us hold dear.

What can we do now?

Let's start with what can be done fairly quickly, which is make carrying out such a shooting more difficult, perhaps so difficult that that fact alone will deter an attempt. It is very worth noting that according to Nashville police, Covenant School murderer Audrey Hale rejected at least one other target venue because it had "too much security."

The Saturday after Parkland, Nashville's Tennessean newspaper published a video about such measures, featuring Sean Burke, president of the School Safety Advocacy Council, who said that "layers" of security at military installations can be model for all schools to remain safe. URL here, please watch the 91-second video.   

Not everything he says translates cleanly to civilian schools. For example, just getting onto a military installation is highly restricted and requires vetting at the entrance gate. But we can and should start with physical security measures for three reasons.

1. First, they will be effective.
2. Second, they don't tread on either sides' core values.
3. Third, they are local-government initiatives, hence do not depend on the federal behemoth to rouse itself, and these initiatives would be poor federal ones anyway. 

The basic principal is simple: Make school shootings hard to do

Making school shootings difficult to carry out consists of two main things: First, it must become very difficult for a shooter to enter a school or its ground with weapons. Second, the schools' designs must inhibit successfully carrying out attempts.

The same Israeli site that refuted the notion that Israeli teachers go armed also says this:

On the other hand. I have never seen a school in Israel that was not fenced in. You must go through a locked gate that is guarded by an armed shomer, a security guard. He or she, on the other hand, is not concerned with educating, but protecting. He or she will ask you why you are there? “What is your child’s name?” “Show me your I.D. card.” And he or she would not let you bring a weapon inside.

Just yesterday (4/5/2023) Nashville's CBS affiliate carried a news story about "safety film" for school windows:

Safety film is a thin clear material that adheres to the glass. It's more affordable than bulletproof glass, making it a popular option for schools, homes and businesses.

"The bullet still goes through it so we always want to point that out that safety film is not bulletproof," said Dave Andrews, president of Solar Insulation. "So it's two levels of security, but this will keep people from coming in through the doors but it's not going to keep bullets from going through."

What safety film does is stop the glass from shattering when struck by one or more bullets. Killer Hale literally shot a door window to pieces at The Covenant School and then stepped through to enter the school. Had the door be layered in safety film, the bullets would have made only bullet holes, but the glass would have remained otherwise intact. 

"That's the idea is to keep them moving or they have too much trouble and then they go away," said [Dave] Andrews.

Entry security and simple access to school grounds must become more arduous than now, all the time. Every active doorway into a school must become guarded, and not by teachers or staff. Metal detectors and backpack inspections, all intrusive, yes, must become the routine. Arrival times for grades, not just for schools, must become staggered to avoid large clusters of students standing outside the school, presenting mass targets, and to avoid large numbers enduring bad weather awaiting entry. End-of-day exits must likewise be staggered.

Interior reinforcements must be made - bullet-resistant glass in all windows, for example, and strong locks with backups on doors. Classrooms in newly-built schools should have very quick and easy exits to the outside (I believe this has actually been designed in for a number of years).

Shooter drills need to be rehearsed by all, teachers and students alike. They can be age appropriate, but trust me, high-school students already know what's happening in America, and will not be traumatized by rehearsing what to do in case of gunfire.

We will have to "do school" differently to reduce the likelihood of shooters attempting the deed or succeeding if they do. It will not look like what we are doing now.

But how is Nashville's school system doing on implementing these are other security measures? Well, they don't. 

Despite all of the options, Metro Nashville Schools has no SROs in elementary schools. No Stop-The-Bleed kits, no security cameras, no ballistic film, no door barricades, and some very questionable training according to people with credibility.

 

A safety scorecard without a single check mark.

TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

None of this will happen overnight - nothing can - but they are all doable and can happen relatively quickly compared to the federal leviathan. And yes, they will cost money, but that can be raised far more quickly at local levels than federal. 

BTW, Tennessee's US senators introduced a bill on March 30 to provide $900 million for school safety. The bill provides funding for  

... both public and private schools to train and hire veterans and former law enforcement officers to serve as school safety officers, hire off duty law enforcement officers, and provide funding to harden schools and increase physical security. 

But the Biden White House almost immediately rejected it.

I would infinitely prefer that new initiatives stay local and not be gutted by the black hole of the US Treasury, however.

Besides, there is no reason that significant federal funds cannot be reallocated to states for this purpose without raising expenditures or the deficit. As I have said, anyone who is not willing to take unpalatable actions, or who in convinced that all the pain must be borne on only the other side, is not serious about this. Federal expenditures dear to both the Left and Right need to be identified for deletion and reassignment.

Once again: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans."

Resurrection concept unclear, say scholars

Easter is the day when Christians celebrate the central tenet of their faith, that Jesus, having died on the cross on Friday, was raised from the dead by the power of God.

The concept of resurrection, though, was not original with Christians. It was a prominent, though not universal, belief among the Jews of Jesus' day. The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that one group of Jews, the Sadducees ("the party representing views and practises of the Law and interests of Temple and priesthood directly opposite to those of the Pharisees,"),did ...

... not accept the Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection (Sanh. 90b; Mark xii. 12; Ber. ix. 5, "Minim"), which was a national rather than an individual hope. As to the immortality of the soul, they seem to have denied this as well (see Hippolytus, "Refutatio," ix. 29; "Ant." x. 11, § 7).

Furthermore,

The older Hebrew conception of life regarded the nation so entirely as a unit that no individual mortality or immortality was considered. Jeremiah (xxxi. 29) and Ezekiel (xviii.) had contended that the individual was the moral unit, and Job's hopes are based on this idea.

A different view, which made a resurrection unnecessary, was held by the authors of Ps. xlix. and lxxiii., who believed that at death only the wicked went to Sheol and that the souls of the righteous went directly to God. This, too, seem based on views analogous to those of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and probably was not widely held. In the long run the old national point of view asserted itself in the form of Messianic hopes. These gave rise to a belief in a resurrection in order that more might share in the glory of the Messianic kingdom. This hope first finds expression in Isa. xxvi. 19, a passage which Cheyne dates about 334 B.C. The hope was cherished for faithful Israelites. In Dan. xii. 1-4 (about 165 B.C.) a resurrection of "many . . . that sleep in the dust" is looked forward to. This resurrection included both righteous and wicked, for some will awake to everlasting life, others to "shame and everlasting contempt."

So by the time of Jesus, the idea of the resurrection of the dead, though not universally held among the Jewish people, was likely the majority view. To be fair, though, even among those who affirmed the resurrection, there was ongoing debate as to its extent - just whom would be resurrected and where, only in Israel or elsewhere also. As time went by, the concept of resurrection continued to evolve.

The Pharisees, a lay movement of Jews who devoted themselves to adhering to the covenantal law of ancient Judaism, affirmed the concept of the resurrection. The Christian apostle Paul was the son of a Pharisee and began his religious vocation as a Pharisee. (Pharisees generally get a bad rap in Sunday Schools but shouldn't. Jesus shared the religious devotion of Pharisees. Pharisaism was a lay movement, just as Jesus found his broadest support among the laity.)

Now, all this is to point out that modern-day Christian understanding of the resurrection is "deeply misunderstood, say scholars from varied faith traditions who have been trying to clear up the confusion in several recent books."

"We are troubled by the gap between the views on these things of the general public and the findings of contemporary scholarship," said Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, authors of the upcoming book, "Resurrection, The Power of God for Christians and Jews."

The book traces the overlooked Jewish roots of the Christian belief in resurrection, and builds on that history to challenge the idea that resurrection simply means life after death. To the authors, being raised up has a physical element, not just a spiritual one.

Levenson last year wrote a related book, "Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life." Meanwhile, N.T. Wright, a prominent New Testament scholar and author of the 2003 book "The Resurrection of the Son of God," has just published, "Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church."

Debate about Christ's Resurrection has focused on whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead after the Romans crucified him on Good Friday, or whether Resurrection was something abstract.

Wright's 2003 book was considered one of the most important recent arguments that Jesus was physically resurrected.

The three scholars also have been challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual's soul in the hereafter. The scholars say resurrection occurs for the whole person — body and soul. For early Christians and some Jews, resurrection meant being given back one's body or possibly God creating a new similar body after death, Wright has said.

It's my experience that the vast majority of Christians readily agree that upon death, the souls of the saved enter immediately into heaven, but when asked about the resurrection of the dead, mumbling ensues. After all, if heaven is your reward instantly upon breathing your last, what purpose could being resurrected have?

Now, this whole debate won't interest many people but theologians, but it actually cuts to the core of the Christian proclamation, as Paul realized:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.

Paul is explaining that the resurrection of Christ is a subset of the larger category of resurrection. The Corinthian church apparently accepted Paul's teaching that Jesus had been raised, but rejected the idea that they (or other also) would be raised as well. That made no sense to Paul. It was like someone today saying, "I drive a Chevrolet but I don't think there is any such thing as General Motors."

The resurrection of Jesus, Paul insists, is of little utility unless it is to show that the promises of God are true, that the promise of the general resurrection is true. In fact, Paul understood the resurrection of Christ and the general resurrection yet to come as belonging to the one and same event, separated by a "time out," as it were. Hence, for Paul, Jesus was the "first fruit" of the general resurrection yet to come.

Yet Wright and others say the church should teach what the first Christians believed. Wright also has argued that the physical reality of a future world after death shows "the created order matters to God, and Jesus' Resurrection is the pilot project for that renewal."

Madigan and Levenson have an additional motivation. They said they wrote the book to help Jews and Christians understand more about their theological bonds.

Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University's Divinity School, said interest in resurrection — along with reincarnation, ghosts and contacting the dead — has grown in recent years.

"The more chaotic our world, with war and disease, hurricanes and famine," she said, "the more many seek a divine response to the problem of evil."

The problem of evil is, I think, the central problem of Christianity and is most often cited by people as the reason for their rejection of it.

To endorse green energy is to be pro-slavery

 Anyone who demands we transition to green energy is endorsing slavery. Period. 

China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.

To be clear, those pushing Net Zero goals, like Democrats in Congress, green energy elites profiting from government support in the form of mandates and subsidies, and the Biden administration, know child- and slave-labor are used to produce the minerals their green technologies depend upon. They claim to care about human rights, but their actions belie their words.

Child labour, toxic leaks: the price we could pay for a greener future:

But scientists warn there will be an environmental price to pay for this drive to create a world powered by green technology. Prospecting for the materials to construct these devices, then mining them, could have very serious ecological consequences and major impacts on biodiversity, they say.

“The move towards net zero carbon emissions is going to create new stresses on our planet, at least in the short term,” said Prof Richard Herrington, head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum, London. “We are going to have to learn how to consider profit and loss with regard to ecosystems just as we do now when we are considering economic issues.”

Metals such as lithium and cobalt provide examples of the awkward issues that lie ahead, said Herrington. Both elements are needed to make lightweight rechargeable batteries for electric cars and for storing power from wind and solar plants. Their production is likely to increase significantly over the next decade – and that could cause serious ecological problems.

In the case of cobalt, 60% of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where large numbers of unregulated mines use children as young as seven as miners. There they breathe in cobalt-laden dust that can cause fatal lung ailments while working tunnels that are liable to collapse.

All of this has been documented so much over the years by so many organizations that "I didn't know" is as morally empty as can be. If you endorse using green energy what you are really saying about slavery is that you do know, but you do not care. 

More than we can bear?

    There was woman whom Cathy and I knew from attending soccer games of a team one of our kids was playing on. The soccer mom, whom I’ll call Anna, was in her late thirties with three children. A few months after the end of the season, we learned that Anna had just been terminated from her job. Shortly afterward, her husband filed for divorce. It turned out he had been seeing another woman for more than a year. We relayed this sad news to someone we knew a few days later. This friend replied, “That’s terrible news. But remember, God does not place on us more than we can bear.”

I have to confess that I find that statement deeply troubling. It presumes, I think, God somehow is the direct cause of tragedy in our lives and that we are all really just human ten pins who sometimes get flattened by the divine bowling ball. But don’t worry, you can handle it because God would not have laid your divorce, or illness, or bankruptcy, or other misfortune on you if you could not bear it.

But the Bible never says that. “God does not place on you more than you can bear” is nowhere in the Bible. Nothing like it is in the Bible. The saying is sometimes attributed to Mother Teresa. But she neither said it nor wrote it.

In fact, the apostle Paul says flatly in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 that he and his missionary companions “were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life... .”

But Paul never blamed God for that. Rather, he did understand that there was only one way out: “… indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God … on whom we have set our hope.”

Probably, the idea that God won’t lay life’s exceptional misfortunes or tragedies won’t happen to someone unless they can “handle” it is a misquote of First Corinthians 10, verse 13, which says,

You suffer no temptation but that which is common to everyone. God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. When you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so you can endure it.

It is temptations to cease discipleship, even if only for a moment, that Paul is talking about, not being struck by a personal difficulty. Note that Paul does not blame God for temptation. After all, the apostle James wrote, “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone…” (James 1.13). No temptations come from God, but we have God as partner when temptations come.

What does it mean, though, that God “will not let” us be tempted beyond what we can bear? Does that mean that God is hand picking and choosing which temptations he will let come through and inflict us? Does he stand aside for some but block others? Frankly, if God is actively selecting the temptations that strike me, then I don’t even want to imagine the ones he blocks. The ones that get through are bad enough. Besides, if God wants me not to sin, why would he let any temptations through at all? If he can block some, he can block them all.

The way I understand Paul’s teaching is that no temptation is possible that is more than we can bear, God being our helper. I do not think that God is carefully selecting which temptations hit us; no, they all get through. But no temptation is stronger than the Christ's ability to defeat it. Therefore, no temptation is more than we can bear, Christ being our strength.

This doesn’t mean it is easy. It does mean that God is faithful and is always at our side, even when we want to sin.

I knew a man in his late thirties, a member of our Sunday School class in Virginia before I entered the ministry. Though happily married, he became attracted to another woman who was also married. He knew this was wrong and he successfully suppressed every urge to act on his attraction, but it was a struggle even though he prayed about it. He read one day Hebrews 2.18, which says of Jesus,

… he had to be … fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

So in prayer this fellow asked Jesus bluntly whether he, Jesus, had ever been tempted to commit sins of the flesh. The answer was not what he expected. He wanted a simple yes or no but instead the Lord’s answer was, “You may trust that the Scriptures are true.” The man realized that the specific temptations Jesus may have faced were not what mattered. The truth that counts is that “he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

For this reason, no temptation is more than we can bear, but only if we know that it is not ourselves who win the fight, but the risen Christ who suffered when he was tempted and therefore is our certain strength when we are tempted.

Martin Luther put this truth in verse. Let’s look at verse two of his hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God:

Did we in our own strength confide

our striving would be losing, 

were not the right man on our side, 

the man of God's own choosing. 

Dost ask who that may be? 

Christ Jesus, it is he; 

Lord Sabaoth, his name, 

from age to age the same, 

and he must win the battle.

Here are four things about temptations that may help us defeat them:

1.     The devil does not tempt Christian people to bring us back to damnation but to remove us from service to God. Once we belong to Christ, the devil has no control over our eternity. But recurring sinfulness blunts our discipleship and hinders others from seeing Christ in us or knowing Christ through us. In tempting us to renounce allegiance to God, which is what sin is, the devil is not trying to reclaim our souls but to keep a claim on the souls of people who do not know Jesus but who might be led to Christ by us – were it not for our sin. Yielding to temptation, therefore, makes us allies of Satan. This should disillusion us of the idea that there is such a thing as harmless sin.

2.     Temptation presents a choice, not a destiny. It may be that comic Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine like to announce, “The devil made me do it,” but the devil cannot make us do anything. James says, “Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” There is no temptation that cannot be defeated by a combination of human faith and divine power.

3.  There is no temptation that makes anyone unworthy of discipleship. Being tempted is not a sin, no matter how severe the temptation or how serious the action would be. Jesus was tempted to deny God altogether and worship Satan instead. He didn’t. Hebrews explains that Jesus was “tempted in all things as we are yet was without sin” (4:15). To be tempted is neither sinful nor shameful. (But it’s nothing to brag about, either!)

    However, being human we will not be able to resist every temptation. This is a riddle: if any particular temptation can be defeated why cannot every temptation be turned back without fail? This question vexed even Paul. He wrote in his letter to the church in Rome,

“I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want to do, I do what I hate to do. So I know that sin lives within me. There is nothing good in my sinful nature because I cannot carry out my own desire to do the good. I keep on doing bad things, even though I want to do good. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. Even though in my heart I love God, I also love ungodly things and I feel trapped by this struggle. What a wretched man I am!” (Rom 7:15-24a, paraphrased).

     Nonetheless, our progress toward a sanctified, holy life is still achievable. “What, then, shall we say in response to these things?” asked Paul, for after all, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The answer is no one who can finally or ultimately prevail. So what to do when temptation strikes?

First, pray, and simply commit that temptation over to Jesus’ hands.

Second, try to identify what appetite the temptation is appealing to, because temptations almost always find a way to exploit natural needs or desires. After 40 days of fasting, Jesus was hungry and so the devil tempted him to misuse his divine power for selfish ends by turning stones to bread. Our natural needs and desires are supposed to serve us, but we sin when we wind up serving them. There are limits to what we may justly desire. Instead, we should redirect that appetite to serving the cause of Christ. 

Third, never let temptations, even successful ones, think you are unworthy to serve God. That would be like Patrick Mahomes thinking that when he gets intercepted, he should hang up his jersey. When we yield to temptation, as inevitably we all will, we should confess, repent, learn from it to be stronger next time, and recommit to serving the Lord, especially to being one through whom others may know Christ. I can’t think of anything that will anger the devil so much, and I’d much rather have the devil mad at me than happy with me.

I’ll leave the last word to Paul, who in his first epistle to Timothy advised handling temptation this way, “…shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”

Let us remember both who we are and whose we are, for we are called to holiness. “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. When you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so you can endure it.”

We may trust that the Scriptures are true.

 

On the table: Reparations to "descendants of enslaved people"

Shelby County, Tenn., is where Memphis is located, and that is the city Tyre Nichols lived in until he lost his life at the hands and feet) of four Memphis police officers. 

NBC News reports that the county commission has voted to spend $5 million to study whether reparations should be paid to - the wording is important - "descendants of enslaved people." 

Officials in Tennessee’s largest county, which includes Memphis, voted Wednesday to study reparations for descendants of enslaved people, adding to a growing list of local and state governments that are considering or are launching similar programs.

Similar proposals are being considered in many places across the country. I have no doubt that the framers of the proposal, and of the possible mandate, use "descendants of enslaved people" to mean black Americans today who are descended from slaves in the United States prior to ratification of the 13th Amendment.

 But they had better be careful in their wording. There are enormous problems with such a classification. As an illustration, consider this headline in yesterday's Daily Mail: "Black Panther communist Angela Davis - who teaches that U.S. was built by racist colonizers - faces calls to pay reparations after genealogy show reveals her white puritan ancestor arrived in America on the Mayflower."

Angela Davis, 79, was flabbergasted to discover both sides of her family were white, and that her mom's ancestors were slave owners, on PBS show Finding Your Roots.

Stephen Darden, Davis's fourth great grandfather, moved to Georgia after the Revolutionary War and records indicate he owned four slaves. Hence, Angela Davis is descended from both slaves and slaveowners. 

So, should she contribute to the cost of reparations, or should she receive them? 

If the statute is written to pay "descendants of enslaved people," will it also specify whether applicants will have to show proof they are so descended? And if so, will an "obviously" white man who can prove it be entitled to reparations? Which leads to the question: what is the nature of such proof, if proof will be required? 

The simplest of course would be tracing ancestry through birth records - except that birth records for slaves can be quite difficult to obtain. Consider the opening of a US National Archives document entitled, "Federal Records that Help Identify Former Enslaved People and Slave Holders," by Claire Kluskens:

Researching African American ancestors who lived before the American Civil War (1861–1865) poses unique challenges. Enslaved individuals rarely had surnames and created few records themselves. Successful research usually requires positively identifying the slave holder(s) who may have created records that mentioned slaves. In addition, Southern states lost records due to the Civil War and other courthouse fires, and often didn’t begin recording births, marriages, or deaths until after 1900. Even African Americans whose ancestors were free before 1865 may find research challenging if their ancestors moved frequently, worked for others, and owned no land.

Back to the Davis problem, because it is extremely unlikely that there are no other or only a few such persons in her situation. Considering only Mayflower descendance, there are as many as 30 million descendants today of Mayflower settlers. (I am one.) Probably a high percentage of the 30 million have both African and European history, especially those who live in the east and the southeast. Then add the number of Africans who were brought here after 1620 to the number of Euros who came here, and the odds are sky high that anyone whose American ancestry on either parent's side reaches back to 1800 or so has dual-race ancestry.

Years ago, I read a Census Bureau report that said that Southerners whose ancestors on one side have lived in the South since 1800 have a 90 percent chance of having both black and white ancestry. I have not been able to find that report, but Forbes reported in 2021 that 33.8 million Americans identify themselves as descendants of two or more races. That is one in 10 of all Americans.

My own Mayflower ancestry is on my paternal grandmother's side from Thomas Matthew Rogers, who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and signed the Mayflower Compact. My paternal grandfather's (and hence my) descendance is from one Jakob Sensing, who immigrated to North Carolina from Germany in the 1730s. Yes, Sensing is a German name, and I have corresponded with Sensings in Germany, though I never met one while I lived there was 1983-1986. 

Despite the Census Bureau's report, it is highly unlikely that I am descended from American slaves  because my grandmother's family lived in the North since the Mayflower, moving to Tennessee only after the Civil War. And no Sensings ever owned a slave. 

But I specify American slaves because my brother had a DNA analysis done which showed he (and hence I) have a small percentage of Brazilian ancestry. That almost certainly indicates non-Euro ancestry for me. Brazil was the number one slave state in the entire New World until 1888, when it was outlawed there. In fact, of the 12 million Africans brought to the New World to enslavement, almost half went to Brazil! The Portuguese also enslaved indigenous people. (And the various indigenous tribes were all enslaving one another for centuries before the first Euro set foot there.) 

Angela Davis has to cope not only with the fact that she has deep-rooted white ancestors, but also that at least one of them was a slaveowner. Maybe this should compel her - and the rest of us - to reconsider what obligations, if any, we owe to one another based on what our ancestors did. Because no one's ancestors are innocent of sins against others, and no one's ancestors are free of being sinned against.

So again: what is the standard for reparations in Memphis? Admittedly, they have not worked that out. But if, for discussion, I lived there and the DNA test showed not Brazilian ancestry but African, could I receive payment? Why? For that matter, why not? 

Also, by specifying reparations only for "descendants of enslaved people," Memphis is automatically excluding black people whose ancestors moved here after the Civil War. Over the many decades after the war, though immigration of blacks (and Asians) to America was highly regulated, the number of immigrants from Africa was quite substantial and is continuing. In fact, "African immigration is now driving the growth of the Black population in New York City."

It would appear, then, that Shelby County's commissioners want to study reparations to be paid to the county's black residents - but not all of them, just some. (And also paid to apparently lily-white people who happen to be descendants of just one enslaved person.) They might want to consider that a poll conducted by Black Voices some years ago found that 75 percent of black Americans favor reparations, but more than half said that reparations would negatively affect race relations because payment would cause resentment by whites and other minorities - and now in Memphis at least, resentment by other black residents. I don't think they have thought this through very well. 

An explanation of classified documents

During my military career as an Army artillery officer, I used and handled some of the highest-classified, most restricted-access documents and materials in the defense department, including on staff of Headquarters, XVIII Airborne Corps, and the Pentagon. I had for many years a TS/SCI clearance and I originated documents that were classified up to Top Secret. I also served as a nuclear target analyst and handled and decrypted Nuclear Control Orders.  So, I would like to offer clarification on what the classifications are and what they mean.

You may from time to time hear someone says that something is classified "above Top Secret" or words to that effect. No. The three classifications of Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret are nothing at all but labels to determine how securely the material must be locked up, whether physically or electronically. Basically, think of it this way: Confidential documents must be locked up (when not in use) in a safe that would take at least, say, 10 minutes to break into, Secret 20 minutes, and Top Secret 30 minutes.

That is all those classifications mean in themselves. There is no such thing as "above Top Secret" because what would be the point? TS is already the most secure that is reasonably attainable. That said, it is obvious that the more sensitive the document or material being classified, the more protection against unauthorized access it gets, hence the higher its classification.

TS materials often (even usually) have codewords attached to them that are used to control who has access to them. I had a TS clearance, but that did not mean that I could access anything classified TS. If I had no part in Operation Dismal Swamp, for example, I was denied access to classified materials relating to it, TS clearance or not. That practice is probably what people mean when they say, "above Top Secret." But actually, all classified materials are restricted to people who have a need to know.

Furthermore, one excuse made for Donald Trump's possession of classified documents is that as president he could declassify any document he wanted to. That is incorrect. By federal law, there is an entire category of classified material, called Restricted Data or Formerly Restricted Data, that cannot be declassified unilaterally by any one person. There is a process that must be followed, with multi-department and multi-agency inclusion. This process and who must be included (by the office that they hold) are precisely defined in the law. These secrets include those that are not originated by the Department of Defense, and that is why the president’s Constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces does not give him unilateral authority on that category of national secrets. In fact, the president has no role at all in the defined process except as a tie-breaker if the others' decision/votes are tied.

As for a president's authority to declassify anything else, that is true. But there is still a process that must be followed. Just taking them somewhere does not do it. Even for a president, there are steps that must be followed and proper procedures that must be done. Records of the declassification must be made. The president cannot declassify simply by thinking about it. Nor does merely carrying classified documents in his or an aide’s briefcase do it. "It is in my possession and therefore is unclassified it I want it to be" does not declassify anything. Again: even for a president, there are steps that must be followed and records of the action that must be made.

Vice presidents, of course, have exactly zero authority in any of these matters.

Update - What is a SCIF?

SCIF stands for "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility." SCIF is not a security classification. It is a construction standard for physical and electronic security for especially sensitive Top Secret materials according to standards set by the Director of National Intelligence.

I did some work in SCIFs, including one occasion overseas that was only a situation discussion that my commander wanted to make sure that could not be accessed (well, bugged) by our host-nation intelligence agencies. In the Pentagon, where I did one assignment, SCIFs are staffed 24/7.

SCIFs are windowless and are routinely, though irregularly (on purpose) swept for electronic intrusion and any indications of unauthorized entry. Materials inside are classified Secret or Top Secret and annotated SCI; see photo. (I never saw a Confidential/SCI cover.) Persons authorized entry into a SCIF are noted as having TS/SCI clearance.

BTW, we used to joke about material that was so sensitive and so highly classified that it was marked, "Burn Before Reading." 

White washing Martin Luther King, Jr.

 Artist Jonathan Harris and his painting titled “Critical Race Theory:”

It is almost impossible to find anyone working for racial justice today who cites and uses MLK's life and work as sources and examples. Even on the federal holiday in his honor, the media offer only the briefest nod to his legacy.

Jonathan Harris is right: CRT is the field of white elites who practically have a seizure reading or watching Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. CRT is in fact another white supremacist movement by which white elites demand that blacks and other minorities (but especially blacks) continue to know their place and do what they are told.

At Vanderbilt Divinity School a required course for my M.Div. was Black Religious Leadership. Each of us was assigned to study the life and teachings of prominent black religious leaders. I was assigned Malcolm X. We each had to explain our work and then defend our work and the person's work. (There was no written work to turn in; it was literally an oral exam. My written assignment was on Nat Turner.)

By the time I had completed about half of my sources for Malcolm X, I was thinking, "What exactly makes this guy a radical?" Because frankly, he seemed pretty reasonable to me. And he nailed it, also:

Is salvation by Jesus only?

 John 14:1-10:            

   14“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4And you know the way to the place where I am going.” 

   5Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 

   6Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” 

   8Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 9Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

What is salvation? What does it mean to be saved? What are we saved from, what are we saved to and what are we saved for? 

Salvation can bring forth deep-seated emotions because people correctly see it as a subject where it is pretty important to be right. I will try to be faithful to the scriptural witness and my own convictions without being dogmatic. Let us remember that our knowledge about God is limited, so we must approach questions about salvation and eternity with deep humility. Not only is God’s grace greater than we imagine, it is greater than we can imagine. 

It would be helpful if we could all start from a common understanding of terms. First is the word “salvation” itself. Countless Christians define it simply as “going to heaven” after they die and are often those Christians surprised to learn that many other Christians offer sound arguments that the Bible does not teach that, nor does the Bible teach that salvation is only something attained in the afterlife only. So with such different understandings among the already converted about something so basic, we should be careful not to sow confusion in the minds of people we are trying to lead to Christ. 

For today let us stipulate that salvation means two minimal things:

1. Salvation is to live this life transformed by personal conviction that, as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them” and that as proof of his promises, God raised Christ from the dead. This confession frees us from the shackles of sin and death and enables us to live lives worthwhile for now and eternity. 

2. Salvation begins, therefore, in this life and is fully accomplished by God in eternity with him. Salvation thus means that the death of our bodies is not the destruction of our persons, for God will restore us from death to eternal life. 

The New Testament declaration is that salvation is not automatic for human beings. We are born in need of rescue from what the apostle Paul called, “this body of death.” Jesus said in John 3:16-18 that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son and that whoever believes in him shall enjoy eternal life, but that those who do not believe are condemned in the first place. That is to say, we do not start off on neutral ground. We start off hell bound and are delivered from that fate by the grace and power of God. 

This is a hard teaching and frankly there are a large number of church people who in their hearts do not really accept it. So we should not be dismayed that people in general resist it. But hell seemed pretty real to Jesus, so we had best take it seriously. This life matters and what we choose and do here echo in eternity. 

That being so, the question the rich young man asked Jesus is of paramount importance: “What must I do to be saved?” The fellow scoffed at Jesus’ first response, scorned the second response, and didn’t even hang around for the third, which was, “With mortals it is impossible but with God all things are possible.” 

“What must we do to be saved?” The answer is repetitive in the New Testament. The briefest summary was given by Paul in Romans 10:9: “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” 

Here is one issue that strikes to the core of people’s level of acceptance, or lack of it, with the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is that one single fact – whether we confess with our mouths that “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead – seems a mighty slender thread for our eternal destiny to hang on, and that for a supremely loving, supremely good, and supremely powerful God to make it so seems overtly unjust or even petty. 

One thing about us Americans: We have a pretty high opinion of ourselves. In our hearts we think we're acceptable to God just as we are. John the Baptist asked people whether they desired "to flee the wrath to come," but today to speak of the "wrath of God" is to mark oneself as a hopelessly hard-hearted, embittered believer in someone other than a loving God who loves and accepts us just the way we are. Evangelist Tony Campolo told of an airline flight he made sitting next to a twenties-something woman who told him she had never confessed Christ, didn't go to church, but was sure she was heaven bound anyway because she tried to be a nice person. And she probably was a nice person, so how can God possibly refuse her entry into the eternal kingdom? 

 Furthermore, there are still billions of people in the world today who do not confess Christ, and they can't all be rotters upon whom any of us would pronounce damnation. Is God less charitable than we are? Is there no divine mercy for them, at least for those who have never heard the Gospel? 

This is a real obstacle to evangelism, and I think we need to be able to address it. So even if someone accepts that he or she needs salvation how do we address the question: Is salvation through Jesus only? 

Here is how I have thought through the question. 

The woman on the airliner really was a nice person – by her own standards. I am a much better person than she because I am a fantastic person, a fabulous person – well, by my standards. But why should she or I (or anyone) think that our individual standards carry any weight to enter eternity? Eternity belongs to God alone and so only God can admit us into eternity. Eternity is God’s house. Who gets in and who doesn’t is his call, not ours. He alone is God; we are not. God sets the rules he chooses, not the ones we want.

God alone can save. “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other,” God said through Isaiah (45:22). So if God alone can save, then God alone chooses by what means. 

If God wanted people to earn their way into eternal life, then surely it would be possible, yes? Yet the Christian understanding is that salvation is simply impossible to earn because the standard is simply impossible to achieve. “Be perfect,” said Jesus, “just as God is perfect.” That’s the standard and we can’t meet it. Period. So where does that put us? It puts us totally reliant on God’s unmerited favor, which is to say, God’s grace: “With mortals it is impossible but with God all things are possible.” 

Christians understand God to exist as the Trinity, three persons in distinct, though perfect, unity with one another: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  “I and my Father are one,” Jesus said in John 10:30. Christians have understood since the beginning of the church that yes, God and God alone saves, but that he does so in the person and work of the Son. And so the apostle Peter says in Acts 4:12, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mortals by which we must be saved.” And of course, we have Jesus’ words of today’s passage, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” 

“Is there salvation apart from Christ?” No. God’s eternal saving work is done through God’s incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth and his exaltation as the risen Christ. Catholics and Protestants alike have always understood that God could have chosen to save humanity by pardoning our sins in any way he wanted to, but through Christ is the way we know God does do it. 

We know that God is sovereign and can, if God chooses, save anyone he wishes for any reason he wishes in any way he wishes. And maybe God does that every day. Yet we have no revelation from God that he does so. We do have certain revelation that God does save through Christ. So why do we keep looking for God’s Plan B? We already know God’s Plan A. Plan A died on the cross.

Here’s the problem with thinking that surely there is a Plan B that doesn’t involve faith in Christ and all it entails. Blaise Pascal was one of the most important mathematicians of the modern era and a devout Christian. In the 17th century he wrote, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.” So how to convince them that Christian faith is not only reasonable but the smart way to bet? Being a mathematician, he looked at the question as one of calculating the odds. 

Life, says Pascal, is a coin toss in which all bets are called in at death. One bet is atheism and the other is Christian faith. At death the coin falls over - heads is God and tails is atheism. Reason alone, says Pascal, cannot decide which is true. So which way to bet is smarter? That is what Pascal is getting at, the smart move.

Agnosticism, he wrote, is actually impossible. An agnostic simply thinks he declines to bet. But you can't decline to bet because you can't decline to die. When the coin falls over agnosticism is indistinguishable from atheism. So everyone is wagering whether they like it or not, whether they even realize it or not. We may either accept the promise of Christ or reject it. Therefore, says Pascal, “If you win, you win everything: if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then: wager that [God] does exist.”

I live my life (imperfectly) according to my deep conviction that "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." What if I am wrong? What if all of Christian faith is nothing but wind, that at my death the coin will fall to tails? If so, I won't even know it because there is no heaven, no hell, no nothing after life.

In what way will I have been deprived? How might I have lived my life better? How might I have better found meaning, purpose, mission and worth? Put simply, in what way would I be worse off believing than I would have been not believing? And how can any of that compare with the incomparable payoff if the coin had fallen heads, even if I could not know for sure in advance?

That’s good enough for me. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” It may be Jesus only, but only Jesus is more than enough.

Christmas Eve 2022

Luke 2.8-20

8And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.

9An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and
they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to people whom he favors.”

15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

Shepherds were in the fields watching their flocks on the eve of the Nativity. When the angel appeared, the shepherds got pretty shook up, terrified, actually, when the glory of the Lord shone around them. 

Nowadays we don’t associate terror with the appearance of God. Terror is something in horror movies. Or terror might be brought about by disaster and impending doom. But God – terror? How can that be?

Maybe the shepherds were terrified at God’s glory not because God is terrible, but because God was about to change things. When they were surrounded by God’s glory and saw the angel, the shepherds knew they were going to be thrown out of their comfort box and yanked into a new thing. They didn’t know what it was, not yet. But they did know that God was doing something big, and it terrified them. 

We usually get all warm and fuzzy about the stories of Jesus’ birth, making them into a big, “Aaahh” moment. But consider for a moment that Jesus’ birth was also an occasion for terror. When the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds, it revealed them more clearly than the brightest spotlight. There they were for God to see, just as they really were. And it terrified them because they knew that before God all secrets are revealed, and nothing is hidden.

A healthy sense of fear and trembling would be a good thing for us as we consider the nativity. For while it is true that Jesus came into the world to save the world, it’s also true that now we have no excuse before God. When God has put on flesh and walked and lived and slept and spoken and died and lived again, right among us – then we cannot claim we didn’t know God or weren’t aware of what God wanted. If we stopped and thought really hard about Jesus Christ lying in the manger, it would scare us half to death. We would be terrified.

But not for long! Jesus came in love, not in threat. So it’s good to hear the first words of the angel announcing Jesus’ birth: “Do not be afraid.” God is not remote, God is here. That really is good news of great joy.

When the heavenly chorus had gone, the shepherds looked at one another in astonishment and said, “Let’s go!” And off they went to Bethlehem to see the thing which had happened, which the Lord had told them about.

It is the last moment their lives will be the same as before. The door of history is swinging wide, and the shepherds are the hinge. 

They found Mary and Joseph and the baby, lying in the manger, just as the angels had said. We have no idea what transpired during their visit. The story leaps directly to the moment afterward. The shepherds left the manger and went around town, telling everyone what they had heard and seen. 

It reminds me of a young girl whose parents took her out west. One of their stops was the Meteor Crater in Arizona. The girl stood open-mouthed before the great crater, a mile across, a thousand feet deep. Then she exclaimed, “Something must have happened here!”

That’s how it was with the first evangelists, those shepherds who ran around town. They had seen something amazing and enormous in its implications: the wonder of their savior born. So they ran through the dark streets, shouting, “Something happened here!” 

Everyone who heard the news was amazed. Maybe they were amazed that a bunch of shepherds would be running around town shouting about God rather than out in the fields with their sheep. Maybe they were amazed that an angelic singing group had given a private performance that night. They could have been amazed that a little baby could be a savior for the people.

I think they were amazed at the fervor of the shepherds in proclaiming the good news. Something shook the shepherds out of their ordinary religious complacency. It lit a fuse under them to become evangelistic fireballs. What dull lives shepherds led, yet here they were, all excited about a new thing God had done and what it signified.

The story is told of a fifth-grade child who was terribly burned in an accident. The doctors said the boy would be hospitalized for many weeks. After the boy was taken out of the critical-care unit, one of the fifth grade teachers packed up his school books and homework assignments and visited him in the hospital. Two days later the burn ward’s chief nurse called her. “What did you say to Christopher?” the nurse demanded. The teacher started to apologize but the nurse interrupted. “You don’t understand,” she said. “We have been very worried about Chris’ will to live. He was in such despair that we thought he had given up. But now his whole attitude has changed. His spirits are high, he’s taking the treatments and doing much better. I asked him what was different. He said, ‘They wouldn’t send books and homework to a dying boy, would they?’”

When the angels serenaded the shepherds, and when the shepherds saw the infant savior, they suddenly realized that God wouldn’t do this wonderful thing for a people he had written off. The human race is not terminal. God would not send God’s own son to heal humanity if humanity was incurable. So the townspeople were amazed at the transformation of the shepherds and the new life in them. “Let’s go!” exclaimed the shepherds, and off they went to tell everyone of the new hope and salvation found in the manger.

The shepherds returned to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. The shepherds went back to work different people because of what they had seen and heard.

It’s easy to overlook that Luke ends the shepherds’ story with the reminder that they saw and heard things which were as they had been told. When our Christmas season is over and we have returned to our usual routines, we need to remember that the gospel we have and the salvation we are given is just that which we have been told. The grace of God isn’t mysterious and incomprehensible—it is just as we have been told in God’s Word. A savior was born in Bethlehem almost two thousand years ago, just as we have been told. 

Like the shepherds, we will soon live in a world when the memory of Christmas is overcome by other events. The shepherds’ sheep still got sick or attacked by wolves. Our cars will still break down and we’ll still have bills to pay. On the outside, everything seems the same. But something big has happened, and now our lives are different. God is with us and the future looks good!

The glory of the Lord has shone around us, and through our doubts and fears there is a voice: “Fear not, for behold, there are glad tidings of great joy. Unto you is born a savior!”